The present invention relates to search engines, and more specifically to search engines using hash algorithms.
Organizations that operate web search engines acquire a great deal of information about individuals based on the search terms individuals enter into search engines. Search terms reveal individual everyday activities, business pursuits, personal thoughts. This large scale and very detailed accumulation of individual's searches leads to a great number of privacy concerns.
Some search engines have decided to make it part of their business strategy to offer privacy enhancements to their search services. Existing “privacy enhanced” search engine implementations differ from most search engines in that they do not log search terms and results, or the operating organization only maintains the logs for a minimum period of time. However, with this type of implementation, the organization that operates the search engine still has access to the search terms and results.